Shawn Healy
Managing Director, McCormick Freedom Project
Shawn Healy is responsible for oversight and management of all
Museum operations. Additionally, he serves as the content expert
and voice of the Freedom Project through public speaking and original
scholarship. Before joining the Freedom Project, he served as a
social studies teacher at the high school level, where he taught
American Government, Economics, American History and Chicago
History to juniors and seniors at Community High School in West
Chicago, Illinois. Healy previously taught at Sheboygan North
High School in Wisconsin from 1999-2001. A 2001 James Madison
Fellow from the State of Wisconsin, he holds an MA from the
University of Illinois at Chicago in political science and earned
a bachelor’s degree with distinction in Political Science,
History and Secondary Education from the University of Wisconsin
at Madison. Healy is currently a doctoral candidate within the
Political Science Department at the University of Illinois at
Chicago specializing in American and urban politics. To join in
the on the freedom conversation visit
FanningtheFlames.blogspot.com
Expert Topics: First Amendment, Civic Education,
Politics and Elections, and Teaching Current Events and Controversial
issues, Democracy School initiative.
Carolyn Pereira
Executive Director, Constitutional Rights Foundation Chicago
Carolyn Pereira has served as the executive director of the Constitutional
Rights Foundation Chicago since its founding in 1974. She has written and
contributed to several texts and articles, including The Drug Question:
The Constitution and Public Policy, It’s Yours: The Bill of Rights (for
English as a Second Language speakers), Service Learning in the Social
Studies, and VOICE (Violence-prevention Outcomes in Civic Education), a
middle school anti-violence curriculum for U.S. history combining service
learning, law-related education, and conflict resolution methodologies.
Her most recent article co-authored with Nisan Chavkin, “Habeas Corpus
and Enemy Combatants” appeared in the 2008 September issue of Social
Education. Her primary work includes professional development and
curriculum/program design with a special emphasis on deliberation and
service. Pereira currently heads up Deliberating in a Democracy, a
five-year project funded by the U.S. Department of Education to engage
high school students in the U.S. and emerging democracies in deliberating
controversial public issues and the Illinois Coalition for the Civic
Mission of School. She manages a 50 person board of directors and a staff
of eight with an annual budget of $3,000,000. In 1983, she received the
Liberty Bell Award from the Chicago Bar Association and, in 1992 she was
the recipient of the American Bar Association's Isidore Starr Award.
Expert Topics: Civic Education, Illinois Civic Mission Coalition,
Democracy School initiative.
Schedule an Interview:
Shawn Healy and Carolyn Pereira are available for media interviews. To
schedule an interview, please contact Abby Taylor at
ataylor@McCormickFoundation.org
or 312-222-3188.